Social Media – When should you Tweet or post in Facebook?

Social Media, Web,

One of the important decisions that will impact the optimum utilisation of social media marketing for firms(or even in personal lives) is the “timing” of the tweets, posts, etc. In an article in Fast Company, Belle Beth Cooper, shares some very interesting insights. The study covers Facebook, Twitter and email newsletter. But unfortunately, LinkedIn was not part of the study(At our company, we use only LinkedIn and email newsletters, and I personally am not convinced about the effectiveness of FB or Twitter for our B2B services).

In one of the studies, the respondents were asked about engagement levels and the following was the result.

(Source: Argyle Social)

The difference in engagement in B2B and B2C settings for Twitter and Facebook clearly varied.

The article also has several other insights like – when do people engage most with social media? Early mornings? Lunch time? Evenings? Weekdays? Weekends? Here is one more interesting chart.

If you are a practitioner of social media marketing or are just curious, you find this article very useful. Read on here.

The Future of Online Education is Now – Online courses from Harvard,MIT, etc

Personal Development, Professional Development,

I stumbled upon edX quite accidentally. One of my very respected LinkedIn contacts shared a link about an online course on the topic ” The Challenges of Global Poverty” by MIT and highly recommended it. I got hooked to this concept and explored “edX” further. What did I learn?

– edX is an initiative by MIT and Harvard

– Free online courses are offered by the edX consortium, comprising of some of the best schools in the world(including Berkley, Cornell, IIT Bombay)

– The courses are spread over 10-12 weeks(approximately)

– Certificates are given to those whose grades are above a certain threshold.

I liked the idea of “continuing education” and enrolled for the course on Global Poverty. It started off well, but at one point, I was not able to dedicate enough time for it and had to drop out. But I learned a lot of new things, and got more confident about completing an online course by managing my time better. Last month, I registered for another course, this time by the University of Texas, Austin on the subject ” Energy 101″ . The course has begun and this time, I am enjoying it more. I have already enrolled for my third course and have plans to learn things I never had the chance to study, like – ” Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Consciousness”  by MITx, ” The Ancient Greek Hero” by Harvardx, etc…

Want to know more about edX and the courses? Click here , here and watch the video below.

The Value of Writing (Blogs)..

Miscellaneous, Personal Development,

The last 3-4 weeks have been quite hectic with lot of travel. My work took me to the states of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Delhi(Greater Noida), Maharashtra(again) and finally back in Tamil Nadu. During this period, I travelled by practically every mode of transport – aircrafts, train(AC/non-AC), bus, Auto-Rikshaw, cycle-rikshaw and what not(except boats). While the travel has been quiet fruitful, my blogging has been a casualty. As I sat to write this post, I realized that my last blog was almost a month ago. While I had convinced myself that the travel was the culprit, Fred Wilson’s blog said that real culprit might be lack of discipline. His view was in a different context,but he attributes a lot of his success to blogging. In his own words, “  I toiled in the VC business for close to twenty years before I hit my stride and the reason I found my stride was my adoption of blogging.

As all of you know, I write every day. It is my discipline, my practice, my thing. It forces me to think, articulate, and question. And I get feedback from it. When I hit publish, I get a rush. Every time. Just like the first time. It is incredibly powerful.

And it is permanent. There is a long and winding record of my thinking out there on the public Internet.”

Now, in addition to Seth Godin, there is one more guy who makes a convincing case for writing blogs daily. And as Fred says, the rush one gets when publishing a blog is something not to be missed. As I am about to hit the publish button, I am getting that rush!!!!

Book I Recommend – “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr

Books,

This is a great book that I completed reading recently.

Recognition for the book : 2011 Pulitzer Prize Finalist

What is is about : The impact of internet on our brains. The way the brains are getting rewired and how much distracted we are becoming everyday due to information overload.

The Wow moment : A clear explanation of how we are becoming “Shallow” thinkers and how we are losing our ability to contemplate and engage in “deep thinking”.

Other insights : Human beings started to speak first and then started to write much later. Now, we are in danger of slowly moving away from the “written”world.

Click on the image to know more about the book.

shallowscoverthumb2.jpg

 

My First 10K Running

Running, ,

Finally…. I completed 1o Kms of running today!! Non-Stop during the weekly Sunday run!! My previous best till a week back was 6 kms at a stretch. Then on Thursday last week(22 August), I hit a new high.. 8 km. Three days later, here I am, scaling another peak of 10 km. Exhilarating!!! Never dreamed that I could run 10 kms.

Till December last year, I had no intention of running. I was content with the occasional visit to the Gym. But at some point, I realised that my weight was not reducing and I was not feeling physically fit. And I also asked myself – what is the point of having nice biceps if I am not fit and I am accumulating fat in my body? That is when I decided to abandon the smelly gyms in favour of the fresh air of the outdoors. Fortunately for me, the beach was nearby.

The Marina beach in Chennai is 4 km long, and has some interesting buildings on one side(the other side being the sea – Bay of Bengal). Since I run in the mornings, I get to see the sun rising slowly on the horizon. The breeze is also quite cool during that part of the day and provides an added incentive to run on the beach.

In December 2012, I read about the Wipro Chennai Marathon which took place inside the scenic IIT Madras campus(Incidentally, I spent a year inside the campus as a Masters student). Around the same time, I also started seeing the tagged pictures of one of my friends from the Wipro Marathon and Auroville Marathon. That gave the inspiration to start running.

In January 2013, I decided to do a 10k in the Wipro Chennai Marathon 2013 and started preparing. I had 11 months time to prepare and set myself  a very easy target – run 1 extra km per month.

The first month was difficult. I couldn’t complete even 1 km without really panting and knees hurting. Gradually it became easier to run longer distances but I was lagging behind my self-imposed targets. By end of June 2013, I was still at 4 km per session as against the target of 6 km. One of my friends suggested that I join the Chennai Runners group of which she was part of, but I did not like road running and also running in a group. I liked the solitude when running.

Then came the announcement of the Wipro Chennai Marathon 2013 in July and this time, I decided that I need some additional motivation. I joined Chennai Runners’ Alwarpet running group, and I indeed got that additional motivation and more importantly, valuable guidance to run long distances. Earlier, I used to run daily, but with little improvement. But now, with just 3 days per week of running, I am able to run more. Within 2 months of joining Chennai Runners, I have scaled the 10 k peak.

But this is only one side of the story. Even though I covered the distance, the time I took for completing 10k was 1 Hour and 25 Minutes, which is extremely slow for regular runners. Most seasoned runners would have completed 20 km in this time.

But hey, I am running my own race and not others’. Why bother? Since this is my own race, my next aim is to reduce the time taken to run the 10 k from 1 Hour 25 Minutes to less than 60 minutes. And I have 3 more months to do that before the Marathon.

Chennai Marathon, here I come!!

Chennai marathon(Image credit : Chennai Runners)

PS:  While on the subject of Marathon, here is an inspiring TED talk on a the impact of Marathon in the war torn country, Lebanon.